Search Results
Journal Article
The Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility
In this article, the authors discuss the run on prime money market funds (MMFs) that occurred in March 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and describe the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF), which the Federal Reserve established in response to it. They show that the MMLF, like a similarly structured Federal Reserve facility established during the 2008 financial crisis, was an important tool in stemming investor outflows from MMFs and restoring calm in short-term funding markets. The usage of the facility was higher by funds that suffered larger outflows. After the ...
Report
Investors’ appetite for money-like assets: the money market fund industry after the 2014 regulatory reform
This paper uses a quasi-natural experiment to estimate the premium investors are willing to pay to hold money-like assets. The 2014 SEC reform of the money market fund (MMF) industry reduced the money-likeness only of prime MMFs, by increasing the information sensitivity of their shares, and left government MMFs unaffected. As a result, investors fled from prime to government MMFs, with total outflows exceeding $1 trillion. By comparing investors’ response to the regulatory change with past episodes of industry dislocation (for example, the 2008 MMF run), we highlight the difference between ...
Discussion Paper
Real Inventory Slowdowns
Inventory investment plays a central role in business cycle fluctuations. This post examines whether inventory investment amplifies or dampens economic fluctuations following a tightening in financial conditions. We find evidence supporting an amplification mechanism. This analysis suggests that inventory accumulation will be a drag on economic activity this year but provide a boost in 2020.
Working Paper
Gates, Fees, and Preemptive Runs
We build a model of a financial intermediary, in the tradition of Diamond and Dybvig (1983), and show that allowing the intermediary to impose redemption fees or gates in a crisis--a form of suspension of convertibility--can lead to preemptive runs. In our model, a fraction of investors (depositors) can become informed about a shock to the return of the intermediary's assets. Later, the informed investors learn the realization of the shock and can choose their redemption behavior based on this information. We prove two results: First, there are situations in which informed investors would ...
Discussion Paper
The Fed’s Balance Sheet Runoff and the ON RRP Facility
A 2017 Liberty Street Economics post described the balance sheet effects of the Federal Open Market Committee’s decision to cease reinvestments of maturing securities—that is, the mechanics of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet “runoff.” At the time, the overnight reverse repo (ON RRP) facility was fairly small (less than $200 billion for most of July 2017) and was not mentioned in the post for the sake of simplicity. Today, by contrast, take-up at the ON RRP facility is much larger (over $1.5 trillion for most of 2022). In this post, we update the earlier analysis and describe how ...
Report
Banks’ Balance-Sheet Costs, Monetary Policy, and the ON RRP
Using a quasi-natural experiment, we show that quantitative easing (QE) interacts with bank regulation, impacting the size and portfolio choices of non-banks. In 2021, upon the expiration of the Supplementary Leverage Ratio (SLR) relief, banks were incentivized to reduce leverage, shedding deposits and reducing the supply of wholesale debt. We show that as a result, moneymarket funds (MMFs) experienced large inflows and shifted their portfolios toward the Federal Reserve’s ONRRP facility. Our results imply that when non-banks can access the central-bank balance sheet, they end up holding a ...
Report
Competition, reach for yield, and money market funds
Do asset managers reach for yield because of competitive pressures in a low-rate environment? I propose a tournament model of money market funds (MMFs) to study this issue. When funds care about relative performance, an increase in the risk premium leads funds with lower default costs to increase risk-taking, while funds with higher default costs decrease risk-taking. Without changes in the premium, lower risk-free rates reduce the risk-taking of all funds. I show that these predictions are consistent with MMF risk-taking during the 2002-08 period and that rank-based performance is indeed a ...
Working Paper
Modelling Overnight RRP Participation
We examine how market participants have used the Federal Reserve?s overnight reverse repurchase (ON RRP) exercise and how short-term interest rates have evolved between December 2013 and November 2014. We show that money market fund (MMF) participation is sensitive to the spread between market repo rates and the ON RRP offering rate as well as Treasury bill issuance, government sponsored enterprise (GSE) participation is more heavily driven by calendar effects, dealers tend to only participate when rate spreads are negative, and banks generally do not participate. We also find that the effect ...
Working Paper
Overnight RRP Operations as a Monetary Policy Tool: Some Design Considerations
We review recent changes in monetary policy that have led to development and testing of an overnight reverse repurchase agreement (ON RRP) facility, an innovative tool for implementing monetary policy during the normalization process. Making ON RRPs available to a broad set of investors, including nonbank institutions that are significant lenders in money markets, could complement the use of the interest on excess reserves (IOER) and help control short-term interest rates. We examine some potentially important secondary effects of an ON RRP facility, both positive and negative, including ...
Report
The minimum balance at risk: a proposal to mitigate the systemic risks posed by money market funds
This paper introduces a proposal for money market fund (MMF) reform that could mitigate systemic risks arising from these funds by protecting shareholders, such as retail investors, who do not redeem quickly from distressed funds. Our proposal would require that a small fraction of each MMF investor's recent balances, called the "minimum balance at risk" (MBR), be demarcated to absorb losses if the fund is liquidated. Most regular transactions in the fund would be unaffected, but redemptions of the MBR would be delayed for thirty days. A key feature of the proposal is that large redemptions ...